PharmHunterJen said:

Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then…

Coming at PharmHunterJen’s question from a different direction. The dose-response is real but shallow at the top. Across STEP 1 and STEP 4 the gap between 1.7mg and 2.4mg is a couple of percentage points of body weight on average, and the average is carrying a wide spread — plenty of people at 1.7mg sit above the 2.4mg mean. If a dose is working and tolerable, "working" is the relevant variable, not "maximal".

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look. It is a small discipline and it changes what you notice.

A narrower follow-up, since the general answer is now clear:

What the dose-response curve actually looks like above 1.7mg, because the trial means hide how few people account for the extra loss?

FDA_TrackerJim said:

Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look.

Careful with the causal language. Two things moving together in a period when five things changed is not a mechanism, and stating it as one makes the thread less useful to somebody reading it later.

FDA_TrackerJim said:

Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look.

Right, and the exception is worth naming rather than left implied, because the exception is where people get into trouble.

I would rather be corrected than agreed with, if it comes to it.